Monterey County Spelling Bee: 'I got 'lugubrious' right?'

There are more than a million words in the English language, and, if you happen to be competing in an American spelling bee, there's just one acceptable way to spell most of them.

A few techniques that might help: Close your eyes and stare toward the ceiling ... use one hand to twist the index finger of the other ... wrinkle your nose ... scratch an itch ...

Fourth- and fifth-graders from more than two dozen local schools used all of the those tactics Saturday at San Benancio Middle School, as they battled for one grand prize at the 30th annual Monterey County Spelling Bee sponsored by The Lyceum of Monterey County.

The best strategy, turns out, was to study in advance (who knew?) and read a lot.

It was also helpful if some other poor kid drew a word like "juxtapose," "untoward," "cauldron," "apocalypse," "seismic," "prophecy," "colloquial" or "ogre."

The last one standing in a field of 54 spelling whizzes was 10-year-old Dagny Brej (try spelling that one), a fifth-grader from Monterey's San Carlos School, where, believe it or not, she only managed a first-quarter "B" in language arts, her favorite class along with science.

"I'm not surprised because she loves to read, and the more you read, the better the speller you are," said her teacher, Karen McKenzie. "Reading really makes a difference."

With a light-brown ponytail dangling over her left shoulder, Dagny zipped through words like "poisonous," "rupture," "bruise" and "disrupting" in the earlier rounds, and then, as one of just four survivors, coolly eliminated the rest of her competition by spelling "reminisce" and, finally, "deductions."

"I loved that she got the word 'deductions,'" said her mother, Carol. "Mrs. McKenzie does these great projects with the kids, using learning tools, and one of the things they do is taxes, which they pay with 'San Carlos bucks.' She loves calculating the deductions, so when she got that word I almost laughed out loud."

Runner-up Olivia Liu from Washington Union School bowed out by misspelling "feminine" after effortlessly handling "precarious," "projectile," "pervasive," "premonition" and "ultimatum," among other words.

Third place went to Stevenson School's Genevieve Baldwin, and Giancarlos Velez of Monterey County Home Charter School earned the fourth-place plaque after wowing the audience earlier by correctly spelling a word that even scared the eventual champ: "lugubrious."

"The word 'lugubrious' definitely is the one I'll remember from today. I'll never forget that word," Dagny said with a laugh. "I was glad somebody else had to spell that one."

Competitors had the advantage of studying all of the words that were used in the first two rounds — easy stuff like "monologue," "proffered" and "adolescent."

Then the contest became more diabolical. Words used in the third round and the finals (in which 18 of the original 54 were still standing) weren't on the study list. That's where Dagny's voracious reading habits (she devours an entire "Harry Potter" book in three days) became helpful.

"I read a lot, so I know some spelling patterns, and I used those to figure out some of the words I wasn't sure about," Dagny said.

"She studied the words we were allowed to study, and then, every once in a while, her brother and I would toss her some big, squirrelly words that weren't on the list, just to see what she'd do with them," her mother said. "And she usually did pretty well."

Dagny said she slept poorly Friday night — she didn't doze off until 3 a.m. — and was nervous throughout Saturday's contest. But she drew upon a favorite mantra from her teacher: "Take a deep breath and go with the flow ... do your best, and show what you know," she recited.

The state spelling bee for elementary students is April 26 in Stockton. The Scripps National Spelling Bee is May 25-30 at National Harbor, Md.